Talking up – and playing down – new rules for the British media, prime minister David Cameron said it was “closing time in the last chance saloon” and argued that the post-Leveson system had “real independence at its heart and is going to be properly overseen without allowing parliament to endlessly interfere.” Concluded shortly before 3 a.m. last Monday – a time that hinted at how much back-room wrangling had taken place – the multiparty deal will require a two-thirds parliamentary majority if the proposed ‘recognition body’ (created by royal charter) is to be altered. The toothless Press Complaints Commission will be replaced by a body whose members will no longer be subject to a simple Fleet Street veto, and the new watchdog can levy fines of up to £1m, direct “prominent” apologies as required, and impose “exemplary damages” on groups that do not voluntarily submit to its oversight.
Appearing before the Leveson inquiry last year, Mr Cameron warned that a full-fledged press law would be “crossing the Rubicon”. At a press conference on Monday he reiterated his wish “to avoid a press law [that] said ‘the press can do this, the regulator’s got to do that, you can’t do that’ – that would be dangerous …” Yet despite the cross-party support for the deal, and the obvious pleasure of the group that represented phone-hacking victims, the new dispensation leaves the British press more vulnerable to corrective pressure than it has been for generations. This is not necessarily a good development.
In a recent book on censorship, the Guardian columnist Nick Cohen writes: “Nothing destroys clichés about the gentle temperament of the British so thoroughly as reading what the British read. In political journalism, the British pick their side and line up their targets. Right-wingers inflame prejudices against gypsies, immigrants and all public-sector workers except the police and the armed forces. Left-wingers inflame prejudices against social conservatives, Jews, and all members of the upper and upper-middle classes except the public-sector great and good. Both suspect the white poor … the thuggish British journalist never forgets that hate sells better than sex.”
At first glance it seems reasonable to conclude that such dubious journalism ought to be placed under adult supervision. But that would be a mistake. For, as Lord Leveson went to some pains to emphasize when publishing his inquiry’s conclusions, even the worst offenders in this tabloid culture play a vital role in the media ecosystem. While educated readers may cringe at the xenophobia and scaremongering that animates the tabloids, any neutral observer would concede that the British ‘red-tops’ routinely defend and police the public interest. Their implacable scepticism towards public figures may have metastasized into an obsession with celebrity, but it also leads to invaluable exposes of political hypocrisy and ensures that civil servants carefully weigh the risks of abusing their official powers. There is no doubt that Fleet Street has gone too far in recent years, but that does not mean that its attack dogs should be completely defanged.
Newspapers work best when they faithfully reproduce a national conversation. If this means giving voice to a disquieting range of social, racial and religious tensions at the heart of a multiculture, British or otherwise, then so much the better. In the long run it is healthier to ventilate and settle these passions on the page than fight over them in the streets. When journalists abandon their moral compass, regulators should step in and restore a balance, but they should do so warily, as the post-Leveson political brokers have tried to.
Downing Street tried to allay fears that the deal would endanger small news agencies. It promised that bloggers, tweeters and online aggregators would not fall under the oversight of the new regulator. While this failed to reassure many online publishers, and the major newspapers were taking legal advice about joining the new body the general response to the deal suggests that the British parliament has successfully avoided heavy-handed regulation. Time will reveal whether the horse-trading between the three parties has struck the right balance, but early signs indicate that the new system is a sensible step in the right direction will impose reasonable restraints on the wilder outgrowths of a tabloid culture that had been left to its own devices for far too long.
